Why does everyone assume they will be worse? They might be more hardline, but they may not have designs on recreating the Soviet Union. Putin wants to recreate it as part of his legacy. He wants to be looked at in the same manner as Lenin and Stalin, not Yeltsin or Gorbachev.
When you look at the guys surrounding Putin they're all in on recreating Imperial (not soviet) Russia. They can't sell their population on improved standards of living, so they have to sell them on imperial expansion. And at this point, the war has increased the influence of the national security folks in Russia.
Their issue now is that they've pushed off a lot of infrastructure spending to focus on the war effort. They don't really have many spare workers and are cut off from a lot of the world economy. Once this is done, the transition from war to peace economy is usually messy (see the inflation post ww1, ww2, Korean war). Their demographics are worsening and they need to spend a ton just to get infrastructure where it was before the war.
They're going to have a tough time once the war ends, and it'll be tougher the longer they fight the war.
